Going Through The Motions
by ObsidianKiss
Summary: I wonder sometimes if it was love. And then I wonder if it really matters.
1. 1

/She's pretty.  
  
I'll give her that much.  
  
Well, that much. and you. Though, I'm not sure I had much of a choice in that. I was, after all, dead for two years.  
  
And you know how that goes./  
  
/I see you with her. And you look happy. Dare I say it- happier than you ever were, ever could have been, with me. She says something to you, a brilliant smile breaking across her features as she leans forward and lays a hand on the lapel of your jacket.  
  
You grin mischievously and grab hold of it, laying small kisses on each her fingertips, your eyes never leaving hers. Not for one second.  
  
And I wonder. could that have been me one day? Or were we just doomed from the start?  
  
Star-crossed lovers in some play?  
  
I chuckle as I think on the possibility of our being the modern Romeo & Juliet. Since I've been back, it seems all I can do is propogate this melodramatic rut I've fallen into. My life is turning into some day-time soap opera, and all I can seem to do is sit back and watch, mugging the camera, head in hands./  
  
/I don't like her.  
  
Obviously.  
  
And thank God people expect this. Thank God they understand it. Because I don't think I could handle the office life, or even life in general, if they expected me to be the picture of redemption.  
  
Forgiveness is cheap.  
  
You left me in the dark and I let you know how I felt about it- my words echoing off the walls of the office building as I said everything I'd needed so desperately to say. To relieve the pressure that had been building up in my head since I hit you that first night back.  
  
Since I first found that I had been gone for two years, and that life hadn't waited eagerly for my return. It had gone on, winding, much like it had before I was even a thought. Before I was even some necessary inconvenience growing within Irina Derevko./  
  
/Weiss has this thing about Chinese food. I think you might call it an obsession. The simple smell of the stuff drives the guy crazy.  
  
Which can make for some rather amusing episodes involving his cat and an old newspaper. I think it was the first time I'd laughed in. well, in two years if you wanted to get technical about things.  
  
I just stood and laughed. With my whole being, I let the feeling crash over me like a tidal wave and I think I might have been happy for a minute.  
Then the phone rang. And though I tried not to, I saw it was your number.  
  
The smiles faded from our faces and Weiss grabbed the receiver, mumbling some clumsy apology and quickly rushing into the next room- feigning normalcy as you asked him some random question about the hockey game.  
  
The cat. the old newspaper. my happiness. they had all been fleeting.  
  
Like us, I suppose./  
  
/I wonder sometimes if it was love.  
  
And then, I wonder if it really matters. I feel the way I feel, and if it wasn't really love than I don't want to think about what it would feel like if it really had been.  
  
I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking of you, for absolutely no good reason.  
  
Sometimes I think I can remember what it felt like to be with you, and its at times like these that your voice sounds the most real. The taste of your skin the most vivid.  
  
I think back to what you said, after my feelings were laid bare in front of you. About the madness you'd experienced after my "death".  
  
Lying there, tangled in Weiss' old sheets as the sky opens up outside, curled up with the memory of someone I can have no more, I think I finally understand what you meant./  
  
Whiskey became my savior, in those first few months. I carried it, ironically enough, in a tiny flask that Francie had given to me on my 21st birthday as a gag gift.  
  
She knew I didn't drink, and I'd promised myself I never would. A bad experience with a "boyfriend" in my first year at college had forever soured me against the wiles of alcohol.  
  
Or, at least, that's what I though then.  
  
But, as the nights grew longer and the memory of you ever more haunting, it seemed the best tact to find something that could dull the pain. albeit momentarily.  
  
It was actually on a mission that I discovered how sweet the companionship of Jack, and Absolut and Sam could truly be. It was shot glass after shot glass until the morning as I waited in that Taiwanese dive, searching for the Man In Dark Glasses who would not come.  
  
It, of course, couldn't help that your voice was yammering away in my ear the entire night.  
  
Look to your right. Look to your left. That guy looks suspicious. Don't drink so much, Syd, you'll be impaired. Bla, bla, bla.  
  
So it went, until I was nauseas from the noise, or the booze, or some horrid combination of the two.  
  
Five hours, the coming of the dawn, and twenty five shot glasses later, the longest night of my life was over with you murmuring something to Weiss about Lauren expecting you home soon./  
  
/It was silver. Engraved with my initials. A beautiful thing, really, to be carrying mouthfuls of death.  
  
At first, my indulgences limited to the odd meeting, where I'd see you gazing at her from across the room. The times I'd walk in on you two in some random intimate embrace in the break room.  
  
Obviously, I'd need a little medicine to dull the agony of having to remember that once, a very long time ago, that had been me.  
  
And it had been good.  
  
Soon enough, though, a quick taste wasn't enough. I needed more to feel better, more to keep myself together and survive the long, lonely plane rides home from the remote locations I'd stopped trying to remember the names of. Airport, after airstrip, hotel, after motel. things just started to blend together.  
  
It was around this time, I suppose, that I took up another horribly self destructive activity.  
  
I saw your face on every one of them. They were, of course, picked for such defining features- the fair hair, fine Roman features, aquiline nose. Not exact replicas, but similar enough to help me forget, for a simple blissful second, that they weren't you.  
  
Nice guys, some of them. College students, married men, bachelors on the prowl- I tried not to care about the details. It was hard enough to do what I was doing without having to care about who I was with and, most importantly, why.  
  
Sometimes, I'd feel the tears begin to well up. I pulled out the flask./ 


	2. 2

/That phone call, I must admit, was a mistake.  
  
I'd always been one to hold my liquor. It was more or less a job requirement to be able to drink five or six able bodied guys under the table.  
  
In fact, I'd won some valuable information in Morocco like that.  
  
But the phone call, I gotta say, was a fluke.  
  
My father had spoken to me that day, actually. He'd pulled me aside just before a debrief, into some darkened office, and begun to speak in the slow, quiet way of his.  
  
Strange how he manages to maintain a monotone even when he's telling his only daughter that her life has gone to hell.  
  
Leave it to the ever attentive Jack Bristow to have seen the signs in me that others had missed. Or chosen to ignore. Late nights, later mornings, discrepancies in mission reports. The endless hotel stays charged to CIA tabs. My perpetual melancholy.  
  
He was devastatingly blunt, but I hadn't expected any less.  
  
"Clean up, Sydney, or I'll be forced to reassign you to another division."  
  
In other words, stop drinking and sleeping around so goddamn much or else you'll spend the rest of your life at some boring desk job where the most exciting thing in my life would be bringing home my fiftieth cat from the shelter.  
  
As you can imagine, this was more than a little upsetting. And the first thing I did was run to the nearest barstool and proceed drinking myself in to an early grave.  
  
If I hadn't been so drunk, I'm sure I would have felt sorry for myself. Lonely. Scared. Drinking a disgusting mixture of tears and vodka. It was, I see now, pathetic.  
  
So pathetic, in fact, that Door Number Two was seeming to be a viable option. I'm not sure how I managed to get from the bar to the payphone without seriously injuring myself, or someone else for that matter, but I did.  
  
When I became aware of what was happening, my shaking finger had hit the final digit to your phone number and the bloody thing was ringing. A surge of blind panic caught me, and I found that despite how much I tried, I simply could not move.  
  
The rings pounded, mercilessly, into my oversensitive eardrums, and I could taste salt on my lips as the other end came to life with a sleepy, "Hello?"  
  
I couldn't breathe, let alone speak. Any declaration of love I'd planned to make seemed almost jocular now as I listened to your breathing and prayed for a quick end to this moment.  
  
When you said "Hello?" again, your voice had taken on an agitated edge and before the line went dead, I could hear a baby crying.  
  
Or maybe, that was just me./  
  
/Then, one day, it stopped. It had been a year and a half since my miraculous return from the dead. Since I came back, and found that someone had taken my place with you and the world had just kept on spinning.  
  
I remember the sky that morning. The window across from my bed flashed with lightening and the rain poured down in sheets. Thunder, or maybe an earthquake, rattled my box of an apartment.  
  
I had, in fact, just moved from the humble abode of Weiss a mere two days earlier. Brown boxes of borrowed clothes were stacked around me as I stared out onto the New York skyline, marveling at how big it all was and how small I'd been in comparison.  
  
A day after the phone call to you, tough as nails Sydney ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning.  
  
I vividly remember the feel of a tube being shoved down my throat as the EMTs worked desperately to save a life that had, technically, been lost two years earlier. My father rode along with me to the hospital, a calm worried look in his eyes as he squeezed my hand and told me to hold on, that everything was going to be O.K. if I would just hold on.  
  
I lost consciousness soon after that and when I woke up, the world was bright and buzzing, my room filled with flowers and balloons and greeting cards emblazoned with horribly cheesy slogans of Get Well and Feel Better.  
  
It reminded me of my tonsillectomy when I was twelve. I kept waiting for the nurse to bring in a big bowl of ice cream.  
  
The nurse never came, and the first person I saw upon waking was, painfully enough, you.  
  
I never asked you why you came, or even how- Lauren had never been too fond of me, and I can't say I didn't know why. But, you came. I watched you, with wearied, tearful eyes as you made your way to the chair beside my bed and sat down.  
  
We said nothing to each other. We didn't have to, I think. We'd always managed to understand what was happening without jumbled things like words.  
  
I studied your profile, taking note of the stubble, the dark circles brimming your eyes. It was my guess I'd been out for the better part of two days and that you'd been there the entire time.  
  
To do what, I didn't know.  
  
You looked at me like you used to, that afternoon. And I don't think I can ever tell you how much that meant to me. My old vigor renewed, I smiled, and remembered what it was to be loved./  
  
/My father, as always, was true to his word.  
  
After a week in the intensive care unit, I was taken to what I would come to find out was the Psych Ward. The room was a blinding shade of bright, and though I asked, they never brought all my balloons and flowers and greeting cards.  
  
Not even the teddy bear Will had sent me from some undisclosed location.  
  
I believe I was staring out into the devastating calm of the morning when Jack Bristow walked, slowly, into my room and took a seat before me in one of those cheap hospital chairs. He looked incredibly uncomfortable and wouldn't look me in the eyes, though I tried to catch his gaze.  
  
After some brief small talk- how was I feeling, how had the nurses been to me, was I thirsty, did I need anything- Jack got down to business, saying everything that protocol demanded of him and not a syllable more.  
  
Due to extenuating circumstances, and a violation of parameters set by my superiors only two weeks earlier, I was to be promptly, perhaps irrevocably removed from active duty. My field clearance was revoked indefinitely.  
  
I was also to enter a rather rigorous psychiatric program where detox and therapy would be made available to me at all times, as well as a more suitable support group for those with selective amnesia.  
  
A facility in San Bernadino would be my home for the next three months, or whatever duration of time was found to be acceptable.  
  
The pictures were actually quite nice.  
  
A job would be held for me at the LA offices, but I was not to return to the division I had once been a part of. He didn't have to explain this stipulation.  
  
When it was all over with, I felt sick.  
  
I told him to leave, and get a nurse on his way out./  
  
/The decision to move across the country was not entirely mine.  
  
Alex, actually, was the one who suggested it. He had a friend in the city who could get a me a nice price on a halfway decent studio apartment.  
  
He even knew someone in the school system who was hiring English teachers.  
Alex, of course, was my therapist at the institute.  
  
In case you were thinking he was someone else.  
  
I couldn't stay here any longer.  
  
I couldn't sit and wonder. The "What if.?"'s were killing me, Vaughn. Every time I saw you two together, it was a knife in the gut that got twisted.  
  
Sure, I tried coming back. But the long office hours and boring civilian secretary work made that flask look more and more appealing. I only lasted a week, before I ended up on the phone again, whiskey bottle in hand, begging Alex for the phone numbers he's offered me upon my release.  
  
It didn't help that there was no hope for any memory recovery. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with me- mentally, I mean. There was no way of telling why I'd lost two years of my life, or why, or even if I could ever find them again.  
  
And I didn't think it was worth dwelling on it.  
  
The world would keep spinning, whether or not I remembered.  
  
The plane ride was a miserable experience, and for some reason I kept thinking of the one we shared after my return in Hong Kong. The awkward silence sitting amongst strangers you have the distinct impression of knowing, but inability to place.  
  
Despite my better judgment, I ordered a vodka tonic in one of those little plastic cups.  
  
I ended up vomiting it back up ten minutes later in one of those little closet bathrooms. I thought of you, Weiss' slip up on Lauren's pregnancy, and I cried. Again.  
God, I don't think I cried more in my life than in that year of hell.  
  
When I was done crying, and a stewardess was knocking on the door, wondering if I could return to my seat because we were about to land, I thought that maybe, for once, I'd made the right decision in something.  
  
The next morning, as I've said, it rained. And I got over it. or, over you, as it were./  
  
/I met someone yesterday. I was in this store, looking for stuff for my classroom- the job is great, a public school in the city teaching third graders. I reached for the last pack of these apple border things, and my hand bumped into his.  
  
I looked up, annoyed at the inconvenience, ready to battle to the death for what I thought was rightfully mine. and I was suddenly caught by a pair of clear brown eyes that caught my breath in my throat.  
  
We both stood there for a second, and suddenly burst into a fit of healthy laughter. His laugh was the best thing I'd heard since I came there- robust, and strong- a good laugh, one that I could tell was used a lot.  
  
He smiled, and offered me the pack of borders, which I declined, and offered to him. So it went, until we both realized how long it could go on like this and, strangely, we laughed again.  
  
His name is Max. He's an art teacher at the school I work for. He likes cookie dough ice cream and waking up late on Saturdays.  
  
He hates hockey, but I've never been a fan of Monet, so we're even on that point.  
  
I think, maybe, I might be happy here. Maybe I'll stop seeing you soon, and stop thinking of you even sooner./ 


End file.
